👋 Hi, I’m Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with Data & AI. ICYMI, check out some of our most read episodes:
Brought to you by FORESIGHT - The End-to-End Data Platform for Investors
You had the best intentions when you bought all those data sources like Crunchbase, Dealroom, Pitchbook, and Harmonic. You thought everything gets logged with that powerful CRM called Affinity. You wanted to connect it all to ChatGPT and start asking questions.
But then you realized that you’re missing the middle layer between your data and your LLM that connects the data siloes, eliminates the duplicates, and normalizes the data swamp.
This is why you need an “entity resolution” data infrastructure, aka the glue. But do you build it or buy it?
This week was a very special one. Despite being in VC for almost 8 years, it was my first time at Slush. And what a first time it was! I’ve rarely met so many relevant people from our industry all in one place: founders, co- and follow-on investors, LPs, and friends from the ecosystem.
But no matter who I met, mostly everyone had one or both of the following topics top of mind:
Are we in an AI bubble? I shared my thoughts about this topic few weeks ago here and coincidently today the market saw its biggest hit in a long time. I spent the way back home researching what has been going on and found this excellent analysis of Nvidia’s Q3 earnings, indicating that demand keeps growing and indeed customers are buying, but not paying - providing first evidence for the structural issues of the “circular AI economy” that I recently described. I don’t want to repeat what’s in the Nvidia analysis linked above but highly recommend reading it in full. Thank me later ;)
The VC market is undergoing a massive transformation. Funds are shutting down (for various reasons), partners and professionals across firms are leaving - to other firms, to start their own micro or solo funds, or to join the hottest new AI labs - and other funds are changing their strategies - towards deeptech, defence, or with “new media” approaches. One thing that unites most remaining funds in the industry, however, is that after the crazy fundraising successes and all-time biggest funds in 2021 and 2022, majority of firms are or will soon be out in the market again raising their next vintage. As LP liquidity doesn’t sit as easy anymore as few years ago, many VCs have to become more creative in fundraising. Therefore, the most frequent question I heard at the conference was “What LPs are you talking to? How do you find new leads?”
For the boring but easy answer, just check out limitedpartnerlist.com where we’ve curated an extensive list of more than 2500 LPs + 15 GP fundraising decks from the likes of Seedcamp, Weekend Fund, Susa Ventures, and more 😉
For the fun but more work-intense answer, read on 😉
Upgrade your subscription to access our premium content & join the Data Driven VC community
Identify New LP Leads at Scale
Public filings of investment vehicles offer surprisingly useful information, specifically in countries like Germany. The underlying logic of the approach is simple: If someone has already committed capital to another VC fund, they may well be open to committing again - possibly to yours.
Fortunately, German fund structures make the discovery process remarkably transparent. Most local VC firms are organized as a GmbH & Co. KG, which means all limited partners must be listed in the commercial register.
How to access another fund’s LP list
Let’s use our friends at HV Capital as an example (works for any other fund too).
Step 1: Search the fund name on www.handelsregister.de
Step 2: Pick one fund entity (here the continuation vehicle) and download the filing via “AD”.
Step 3: Upload the filing to ChatGPT or any other chat provider of your choice and prompt “create a list from all shareholders/investors in this vehicle” and you’ll get exactly what you want: A list of all LPs including their registration numbers.
Share this article with others who might benefit.
Scaling the data collection
Copying LP files and names manually from hundreds of filings is… not fun. So instead, you can easily automate the task with ChatGPT Atlas. I’ve described how to use it for browser-based workflow automations here before.
Here are the 3 simple steps:
“Find the top 100 VC funds registered in COUNTRY”
“Go to the public register of COUNTRY, look up each fund name via search, go to their most recently registered vehicle, download the PDF, and copy all information from the vehicle into a list with five columns: ‘Date’ (=incorporation of vehicle), ‘Fund name’ (=name of the fund), ‘Investor name’ (=name of the LP), ‘Count’ (=if investor name shows up more than once across filings, start counting how often), and ‘Enrich’ (=lookup basic information online like website and contact email). For every new investor into a fund, create a new line, except for duplicates where you should increase the count.
"Sort list by count to find most active LPs”.
With this approach, you can automate LP lead gen and receive an extensive list based on activity - with the ability to filter for recent activity based on dates of incorporation.
Snapshot of Limitedpartnerlist.com
Again, if you want to follow the easy path, check out limitedpartnerlist.com where we have aggregated various LP lists from the web and enriched them with useful information.
Stay driven,
Andre
PS: Join our free webinar with Atomico, Bain Capital Ventures, and Vestberry to discover how top funds leverage AI for portfolio insights and value creation next Wedn 26th 5-6pm CET here
